Top 250 Jonathan Haidt Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Liberals are so committed to a narrative of oppression and exploitation that they can’t take good news, they can’t accept good news.”

— Jonathan Haidt

152. “Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate.”

— Jonathan Haidt

153. “Scientists became “moral exhibitionists” in the lecture hall as they demonized fellow scientists and urged their students to evaluate ideas not for their truth but for their consistency with progressive ideals such as racial and gender equality.14.”

— Jonathan Haidt

154. “The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness.”

— Jonathan Haidt

155. “Some constraint is good for us; absolute freedom is not.”

— Jonathan Haidt

156. “Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.”

— Jonathan Haidt

157. “With such a vast and wonderful library spread out before us, we often skim books or read just the reviews. We might already have encountered the Greatest Idea, the insight that would have transformed us had we savored it, taken it to heart, and worked it into our lives.”

— Jonathan Haidt

158. “After analyzing the DNA of 13,000 Australians, scientists recently found several genes that differed between liberals and conservatives.”

— Jonathan Haidt

159. “There is now a great deal of evidence that religions do in fact help groups to cohere, solve free rider problems, and win the competition for group-level survival.”

— Jonathan Haidt

160. “If you take home one souvenir from this part of the tour, may I suggest that it be a suspicion of moral monists. Beware of anyone who insists that there is one true morality for all people, times, and places – particularly if that morality is founded upon a single moral foundation. Human societies are complex; their needs and challenges are variable.”

— Jonathan Haidt

161. “Individuals who could not form cooperative alliances, on average, died sooner and left fewer children. And so we are the descendants of the successful cooperators.”

— Jonathan Haidt

162. “Experiment participants asked to pick which politician looked more confident in a photograph picked the winner of the race two thirds of the time. This phenomenon held up even when they only glimpsed the photographs for a 10th of a second.”

— Jonathan Haidt

163. “As Epley and Dunning had found, people really are open to information that will predict the behavior of others, but they refuse to adjust their self-assessments.”

— Jonathan Haidt

164. “But instead of talking about religions as parasitic memes evolving for their own benefit, Atran and Henrich suggest that religions are sets of cultural innovations that spread to the extent that they make groups more cohesive and cooperative.”

— Jonathan Haidt

165. “You can’t have much of a mission without good allies and a good enemy.”

— Jonathan Haidt

166. “It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love – love within groups – amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders, may be the most we can accomplish.”

— Jonathan Haidt

167. “More specifically, moral capital refers to the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.”

— Jonathan Haidt

168. “Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language – a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.”

— Jonathan Haidt

169. “Anything that binds people together into a moral matrix that glorifies the in-group while at the same time demonizing another group can lead to moralistic killing, and many religions are well suited for that task. Religion is therefore often an accessory to atrocity, rather than the driving force of the atrocity.”

— Jonathan Haidt

170. “If people can’t satisfy their need for deep connection in other ways, they’ll be more receptive to a smooth-talking leader who urges them to renounce their lives of “selfish momentary pleasure” and follow him onward to “that purely spiritual existence” in which their value as human beings consists.”

— Jonathan Haidt

171. “I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.”

— Jonathan Haidt

172. “Sages in many societies have converged on the insight that feelings are always compelling, but not always reliable. Often they distort reality, deprive us of insight, and needlessly damage our relationships.”

— Jonathan Haidt

173. “You’ve got to look at the ways that religious beliefs work with religious practices to create a religious community.11 Believing, doing, and belonging are three complementary yet distinct aspects of religiosity.”

— Jonathan Haidt

174. “People are trying harder to look right than to be right.”

— Jonathan Haidt

175. “After analyzing the DNA of 13,000 Australians, scientists recently found several genes that differed between liberals and conservatives.15 Most of them related to neurotransmitter functioning, particularly glutamate and serotonin, both of which are involved in the brain’s response to threat and fear.”

— Jonathan Haidt

176. “Let’s assume that every commune was started by a group of twenty-five adults who knew, liked, and trusted one another. In other words, let’s assume that every commune started with a high and equal quantity of social capital on day one. What factors enabled some communes to maintain their social capital and generate high levels of prosocial behavior for decades while others degenerated into discord and distrust within the first year?”

— Jonathan Haidt

177. “If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.23.”

— Jonathan Haidt

178. “And Dunbar points out that in our ultrasocial species, success is largely a matter of playing the social game well. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

— Jonathan Haidt

179. “Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong. Specific rules may vary across cultures, but in all of the cultures Turiel examined, children still made a distinction between moral rules and conventional rules.14.”

— Jonathan Haidt

180. “A great deal of research in social psychology shows that people are warmer and more trusting toward people who look like them, dress like them, talk like them, or even just share their first name or birthday.”

— Jonathan Haidt

181. “When community standards are enforced, there is constraint and cooperation. When everyone minds his own business and looks the other way, there is freedom and anomie.”

— Jonathan Haidt

182. “Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.”

— Jonathan Haidt

183. “We humans have a dual nature – we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.93 If you take that claim metaphorically, then the groupish and hivish things that people do will make a lot more sense. It’s almost as though there’s a switch in our heads that activates our hivish potential when conditions are just right.”

— Jonathan Haidt

184. “Depressed people are caught in a feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort thinking further.”

— Jonathan Haidt

185. “Many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt.”

— Jonathan Haidt

186. “In later studies, Mischel discovered that the successful children were those who looked away from the temptation or were able to think about other enjoyable activities.”

— Jonathan Haidt

187. “Rather, my research on the moral emotions has led me to conclude that the human mind simply does perceive divinity and sacredness, whether or not God exists.”

— Jonathan Haidt

188. “If you know what your mind is up to, and why you so easily see the world through a distorting lens of good and evil, you can take steps to reduce your self-righteousness. You can thereby reduce the frequency of conflicts with others who are equally convinced of their righteousness.”

— Jonathan Haidt

189. “Mischel discovers that the number of seconds you waited to ring the bell in 1970 predicts not only what your parents say about you as a teenager but also the likelihood that you were admitted to a top university. Children who were able to overcome stimulus control and delay gratification for a few extra minutes in 1970 were better able to resist temptation as teenagers, to focus on their studies, and to control themselves when things didn’t go the way they wanted.27.”

— Jonathan Haidt

190. “If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy.”

— Jonathan Haidt

191. “When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent.”

— Jonathan Haidt

192. “Good and evil do not exist outside of our beliefs about them.”

— Jonathan Haidt

193. “The results were stunning. Among the children who had been “protected” from peanuts, 17% had developed a peanut allergy. In the group that had been deliberately exposed to peanut products, only 3% had developed an allergy.”

— Jonathan Haidt

194. “If you want your kids to learn about the physical world, let them play with cups and water; don’t lecture them about the conservation of volume. And if you want your kids to learn about the social world, let them play with other kids and resolve disputes; don’t lecture them about the Ten Commandments.”

— Jonathan Haidt

195. “There’s the unusual stuff that psychopaths do – impulsive antisocial behavior, beginning in childhood – and there are the moral emotions that psychopaths lack. They feel no compassion, guilt, shame, or even embarrassment, which makes it easy for them to lie, and to hurt family, friends, and animals.”

— Jonathan Haidt

196. “Behind every act of altruism, heroism, and human decency you’ll find either selfishness or stupidity.”

— Jonathan Haidt

197. “Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD.”

— Jonathan Haidt

198. “Safetyism” refers to a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.”

— Jonathan Haidt

199. “This is what we mean when we talk about safetyism. Safety is good, of course, and keeping others safe from harm is virtuous.”

— Jonathan Haidt

200. “By the standards of our great-grandparents, nearly all of us are coddled. Each generation tends to see the one after it as weak, whiny, and lacking in resilience. Those older generations may have a point, even though these generational changes reflect real and positive progress.”

— Jonathan Haidt